I Won’t Call Trump a Liar

In a recent NPR interview, journalist, Mary Louise Kelly explained why she chose not to use the word lie when writing about Donald Trump.

“Our job as journalists is to report, to find facts, and establish their authenticity and share them with everybody, it’s really important that people understand that these aren’t our opinions. … These are things we’ve established through our journalism, through our reporting … and I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”

What a crazy concept. Kelly appears to be inferring that we are thinking intelligent human beings who can form our own opinions.

Few Journalists follow the rules anymore. Newspapers, networks, and blogs report their versions of the news, but fewer and fewer news organizations bother to objectively print the facts.

Some believe media is a beast feeding upon our worst inclinations and telling us what to think and believe.

Here’s the truth, many Journalists have become lazy; reporting an opinion is far easier than reporting the facts.

In place of our grand old system of journalism, we curate, cull, and transform information into sleek sexy sound bites, and call it news. Somewhere in there is an iota of truth, it’s buried under agendas, and bolstered by greed.

No wonder Americans are suspicious of the media.

Kelly is a Journalist. She writes down the facts and presents them to us in a logical order that pleases the mind.

We take her work and consume it because that’s what thinking folks do. Then we form our own opinions, thoughts, and ideas. She doesn’t have to tell us that Trump is a liar; we can figure that out for ourselves.